The Role Of The Narrator In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

In the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is a young mother that suffers from depression. She is married to a physician who underestimates the severity of her illness, prescribing bed rest in a secluded room as her form of treatment. As an example of a dynamic character, the narrator has a change in her mental condition by the isolation she receives in order to recover from her depression.
As her physician, the narrator’s husband forbids her to participate in any creative activity that would exercise her imagination as part of her cure. Although she disagrees with him, she did not say anything, instead she vents through her writing in a secret diary, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good” (Gilman 380). By her weakness keeping her silent and not expressing her disproval, she unknowingly accepts the treatment that in time will only worsen her condition. However, letting her mind rebel, she turns her imagination towards the wallpaper.
She first despised the wallpaper and requests to have it removed, however, after being denied the request, she began to view it differently.
First she only sees curves in the pattern, but as her negative feelings control her depiction, the images become more sinister, making her become fixated on the wallpaper. “Her diary entries mark her increasing fascination with a heavily patterned wallpaper as she turns her excess energy toward understanding its bizarre forms and speculating on the history of the room itself” (Scott 201). As her fixation continues, the narrator becomes progressively more dissociated with
reality. The narrator then begins to show signs of unusual acts. She starts to believe that under certain weather conditions, the wallpaper begins to smell like the color yellow. She is also unaware of how a certain mark was made that is present along all the walls of the room. “It is only afterwards that we find out that she is herself the source of these new marks as she bites the bedstead and crawls around the room, shoulder to the wallpaper” (Schumaker 595). At first the narrator also fails to come to the realization that the woman in the wallpaper is in the same predicament as she is. She even disapproves of the woman’s efforts to escape. However, after she finally identifies herself with the woman, she realizes that she is the one in need of rescue and that tearing down the wallpaper will free her from her husband and society. “The woman behind the paper helps the narrator to tear down the paper, assisting in the destruction of the other self” (King 31). In attempt to cure her from depression, the use of isolation as treatment has an adverse effect and the narrator has a drastic change in her mental condition. Using her imaginative thinking and expressive writing was thought to be a productive escape, but instead forces her to repress her thoughts, which leads to her growth in madness.